Learning of Harlem via Twitter! One World – Many Stories

One World – Many Stories is the theme for Australian Childrens Bookweek from Aug 20th to Aug 26th. Often wishing that I did not live and teach in a remote rural area and that we could readily ask a book author or a writer to come in and speak with our students, I decided to put out a tweet, tagging it #author to see if there was an author who might come in remotely (virtually) and talk to my Year 11 IT class. (To be honest, I did not think I would have any luck, as I only have one author or writer in my tweet follow).This would be an appropriate activity for Book week.

Not really expecting a response, I was absolutely delighted to get a prompt reply from @Herzwords within a couple of hours.

First step was to check out Christopher’s twitter profile. This led me to his website Herzwords and a fascinating story on Christopher himself – his passion for writing, his determination to publish a book “The Last Book in Harlem”. In fact, reading the newspaper article on From Street Selling to Publisher is of great interest. How fortunate are we to have him present over skype! His story alone is an inspiration!

A time and date was agreed upon (next Friday morning which will be his Thursday night). After some thought, we will use skype and videoconference in to our library interactive whiteboard. What I really loved is the fact he wants active and interactive involvement from the students and has suggested that students actually write a piece of a story and we put it all together on an online site.

Christopher, if you read this, we are excited to have you come in and share your experience and passion for writing……and how appropriate to the theme:- “One World, Many Stories”.

2 responses to “Learning of Harlem via Twitter! One World – Many Stories”

This is so exciting – thankyou for sharing! I am currently studying how todays generation of sudents are learning through a ‘new media’ and this certainly fits the bill! I hope you don’t mind but I will be sharing this with others! You are doing an amazing job, I work one day a week and it is so hard to cram all this amazing ‘stuff’ into the one day, but I look forward to when I do take on more hours!

About Me

G'day! I am a secondary teacher in a small rural prep to year 12 school in Australia. I teach Information Technology and Accounting and am passionate about learning, immersing technology in the classroom, rural education and global education.
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